Charting Best Practices
Selecting the right chart type for your data
Once you have identified the audience for your chart, the metrics they need to see and the data that will power the metrics, it is time to select the right chart type for your data. This selection depends on the type of analysis your audience will need to do with the data. In this infographic, we will see the common forms of data analysis needed for everyday business decisions and the charts that facilitate them. Continue reading
6 tips to increase the usability of your charts
As people get busier day by day, charts just doing the job of converting data into easily identifiable patterns and trends just isn't enough anymore. They have to present all information clearly and concisely, prioritize information for understanding them at-a-glance and remove any possibility of ambiguities. Continue reading
How to create an intuitive drill-down interface?
Drill-down charts are widely used in reports and dashboards. They help maximize business information by presenting the data in digestible chunks. However, in a lot of applicatons a majority of of users are unable to reap their benefits completely owing to the unintuive drill-down interface the application has. Haven't you ever come across a report where you had no idea that the charts could be drilled down into? Or you drilled down multiple levels into the chart only to lose track of where you currently are or where you came from? Continue reading
Advanced usability tips for your charts
Businesses these days are becoming more and more analytics-driven, and applications powering these businesses are putting more emphasis than ever on their reports and dashboards. While plotting charts and gauges does help make more sense of the business data, the analysis can be empowered further by making the charts more usable. Continue reading
5 tips for writing great chart captions
Your users are becoming busier by the day. Your charts are packing in more info, and are becoming denser by the day. As a result, if users need more than a few seconds to grasp the significance of the data plots, we've lost the game. We need to provide the meta information in a concise manner to enable at-a-glance comprehension. This is where the chart caption comes into focus. It occupies a very prominent place in a chart, and a well-written caption makes a chart much easier to comprehend by an order of magnitude. In this post let us review a few tips in writing concise and telling captions. Continue reading
Conceptualizing an effective business dashboard – an outline
Conceptualizing a business dashboard is a complex process. It requires in-depth knowledge of the business processes involved and deep technical knowledge of how to go about implementing it too. But another aspect that is often overlooked is an understanding of how the end user will interact with the dashboard. A poor understanding of that leads to poorly designed dashboards, which hinders decision-making, and kills the very purpose of the dashboard. With this article, we aim to equip you with a basic understanding of how end users interact with a dashboard and more generally, how you can conceptualize your business dashboards better. Continue reading
Business tricks they don’t teach at B-Schools – How to report poor performance and get away with it?
For management executives, the quarterly meeting could be a dream or a nightmare. If you and your department have done well, it is time to thump that chest and declare how you are the best thing since beer. But if your performance figures are not up to the mark, it is time to pick from the 101 reasons to weasel out of a meeting. In this post, I would like to provide some tips on how to get out of that dreaded corporate scenario, using what I will conveniently call dressed-up reporting. Continue reading